There are quite a few items we have our eyes and ears on today, including the potential for the GOP to finally cave and meet the President on his suggested compromise to temporary extensions to the Bush Tax Cuts. We're also watching the continuing "civil" war in the Republican Party over earmarks among other things, And we've been going over the announced - or rather, leaked by the chairman - details of the Deficit Commission's report, which we'll likely tackle at some point in the near future.
However, today is Friday - so we'd like to celebrate the efforts some of our staff and their colleagues on an outside project that launched this week.
We know that more than a few professional cartoonists and other media professionals read the Daily Felltoon and our daily commentaries. So we'd like to direct them - and you - to the website for a brand new project called Snow-by-Night.
It's an attempt at a new way to handle cartooning and comic books similar to a direction in which the major comic labels are going. It's an online graphic novel, one that will be be released at the rate of a page every Wednesday.
Like the serial cartoon strips of old, the story will follow a continuous arc - and has been written and created by someone who has worked professionally in the gaming and fantasy storytelling field. It's professionally edited, penciled and digitally inked, and then digitally colored - and then professionally published online. When the online graphic novel reaches around 32 pages, the plan is to have each finished chapter made available - on demand - to be ordered as a printed product. In other words, a good old-fashioned comic book.
Like many new media ventures, the Snow-by-Night team are using tools like Facebook and Twitter to grab the attention of those people who are more plugged in.
One feature we at the Daily Felltoon like about what they're doing with Snow-by-Night. For them, it's about the story first - and then the artwork must back up that great story.
They've got a lot planned to expand that story into a fully-fleshed out world, so we hope you'll go to snowbynight.com and check out their work.
If there was no other reason for us to recommend this project than that some of our staff was involved, we would. But this endeavor seems to be of high quality, and it appears that our friends are attempting to take the business of cartooning in a new direction - something we strongly favor.
Enjoy their work - and your weekend.
